“YOU” are the Brand to Your Farmers

After all, that’s what you are selling!

I don’t want to discount all the work that goes into creating logos, mission statements and slogans because those are critical for overall brand recognition and advertising purposes. Those branding elements definitely have their place in a business. However, to your farmers, to your grain & livestock producers, to your Ag retailers & feed dealers, “You” are the brand. When I say “You”, I am including you and the sales support team that gets the product ordered, manufactured, delivered and invoiced correctly.

Why is this so important? Because that is what the customer is really buying. And the only place to get that brand is through you. Salespeople are frequently battling price resistance. Often times, as in the case of seed or equipment, it is the exact same product, from a similar retailer. So, what’s the difference? You!

As Ag companies consolidate and get bigger, the marketing brand certainly becomes important and the corporate activities can have a positive or negative effect on our brand. However, all that is forgotten when a customer interacts with his “local” team from that company. Imagine some of the good and bad situations below and how they affected the brand of the company. In these situations, the corporate branding message was set aside and for this customer, this became our brand – for better or worse.

In 90-degree heat, a new bag delivery driver told an elderly female horse feed customer to help unload the 2 tons of horse feed into her barn. When she walked away, he made the statement “Get back here you old bag and help unload” I have to put it in quotes as it was too unbelievable when I got the complaint call. End result: Our brand was mostly repaired with apologies and very intense driver training.
Do what you say you will: You make a promise to get back to a customer with a price or piece of information. Do it and you build your brand. Fail and you make a withdrawal from the bank account of trust that the customer has with you. If you can’t deliver on a promise, get on the phone and explain why you can’t. More importantly, explain when you will.
In a previous blog, I mentioned an instance where a truck driver realized the wrong feed had been ordered. This happened on many occasions as order entry communication can get a little challenging. We had many new people come to work in our offices and many just didn’t understand Ag customers or how to work the computer system. On the other side of the order, we had many customers that needed our office staff to know which feed they needed to order. It was common for a farmer to call and say “Send me 6 tons of my feed”. It took some head knowledge to know who the customer was, which of his feeds he wanted and which bin it went in. Good communication from the office to the sales person and to the driver was critical. For busy farmers, this is an essential part of your brand.
Production issues were creating 2-3 hour wait times for customers to get their trucks loaded. The issues were real and had to be dealt with. Everyone involved was aware of the impact to the customer and to our business. Being as open with customers as you can and sharing the updates as they become available will help when this happens. In this instance, we lost some short-term sales because the customers needed their feed. However, by staying in front of them and letting them know what was going on, we were able to recover quickly from losing those sales.
There are too many examples when invoicing or computer systems went wrong and the customer wasn’t invoiced correctly. This pain gets really sharp, really fast if it is not dealt with correctly. It is one of the toughest brand issues to overcome. Said another way, all the fun and games come to an end when you mess with someone’s money. Now, there were weeks or months that went by without an issue. Many times, customers will forget all the good times when you begin to make mistakes on their bill or their grain payments. The brand building tip here is the same as others – get in front of the customer and get them fixed quickly.

You can look upon your brand as a bank account that a customer has with you. It evolves over time with deposits and withdrawals. Like it or not, intentional or not, over the course of an Ag sales career, you will make withdrawals. Salespeople can really struggle with this. In their mind, they put in a lot of time and effort to sell this customer. Then, a driver, an operations or admin person did something completely out of the salesperson’s control to “mess” it up. It creates internal strife quickly. Just keep making lots of deposits and try to reverse the withdrawals. Build your brand one deposit at a time.

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